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EULOGY 




OCCASION OF THE BURIAL 



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Abraham Lincoln 



DELIVERED IN Till. 



CITY HALL. PROVIDENCE. 



Al'KIL 19, 1865, 



BY REV. SIDNEY DEAN. 



PROVIDENCE: 

H. II. THOMAS Ss CO., PRINTERS, EVENING PRESS OFFICE. 

1865. 



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EULOGY 



PRONOUNCED IN THE 



CITY HALL, PROVIDENCE, APRIL 19, 1865, 



ON THE 



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OF 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 



BEFORE HIS EXCELLENCY, JAMES Y. SMITH, GOVERNOR OF THE STATE 

OF RHODE ISLAND; MEMBERS OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY; CITY 

AUTHORITIES ; THE MILITARY ; CIVIC SOCIETIES, AND OTHERS. 



BY REV. SIDNEY DEAN. 



PROVIDENCE: 

H. H. THOMAS & CO., OFFICE OF THE DAILY PRES8. 
1865. 



EULOGY 



The awful events of the past few days ; the place 
and circumstances of our assembling ; the mourning 
drapery by which we are surrounded j the sadness 
which fills all of our hearts, would make silence itself 
eloquent. I feel that it would be more becoming in 
me to weep with you, oh, my poor, smitten country- 
men. Words, always weak to express the passions 
when stirred to their profoundest depths, are doubly 
weak to-day. 

A common sorrow rests upon all of our hearts. 
None can look his sorrowing brother in the face and 
say : " I am exempt from the heaviness of your 
burden ; I am released from the tasting of your 
bitter cup." An agony of grief cements us, nay, 
melts us into one. The crucible is the country ; the 
lurid fire is lit by treason and fed by the hand of 
assassination and murder most foul. With a veil 
over our eyes we have trusted perfidy itself, and 
the dead body of the hope and love of the nation is 
our reward. We have looked for the sceptre of 
honor to be held in bloody hands, and our answer is 
the bullet from the black throat of the pistol of the 
parricide, and the dagger's thrust from the red hand 



of the murderer. Both have struck the nation's 
heart. 

Sorrow has overwhelmed the great soul of our 
people. Doubt, distress, forebodings, the deepest 
anxiety, have in an hour taken possession of the 
public mind. We have been hurled from the high 
meridian of hope into the even tide of darkness and 
distress. The springs of our joy have suddenly 
rolled backward upon themselves, or have been 
drowned in the depths of this our great woe. We 
looked out upon the golden sheen which tinged the 
clouds, and saw their dark banks breaking and 
scattering before the rising of the sun of our nation's 
peace, and in a moment, the gloaming of the morning 
was quenched in the pitchy darkness of the new 
night of woe into which the nation was plunged. 
May God forgive us, if in our hour of trial and 
despondency, or in our dawning of gladness at the 
prospects of peace, we made an arm of flesh our hope. 

God gave Abraham Lincoln to the nation, and he 
won our love and kept it. Through all the awful 
hours, the bloody sweat of our nation's Gethsemane, 
we have turned our eyes to him. He has not faltered. 
Calm in the midst of the hurricane, he has stood as 
the pilot accustomed to the storm, and when brave 
hearts have been appalled at the nearness of the 
breakers, whose mad fury was with hoarse voice 
chanting the dirge of a nation's death, the cool, brave- 
heart was always shining through the honest face of 
our true pilot ever at his post. We were brought 
by him past point after point of our danger. The 



last dangerous headland seemed to be passed; the 
storm was subsiding ; the welcome haven of peace 
was just before us, when — how shall I speak it ? — an 
assassin shot the pilot at the wheel ! May God 
fo.rgive the utterance, if wrong, when we curse the 
moment which suffered this fiend to be born of the 
loins of woman, and made him a kinsman of our race 
and nationality. 

Judas covenanted with high officials, himself a 
hireling, for his Master's life. This second Judas, 
worse than his namesake, went out from the presence 
of the chief priests and counsellors of treason and 
himself committed the murder. The first Judas, 
under the keen pangs of remorse, cast the price of 
blood, — of which he was only the accessory before 
the act, — at the feet of his employers and hanged him- 
self. The second Judas we trust will be hanged in the 
sight of the world whose air he poisons in inhaling, by 
the hands of a pure justice, and we trust that all his 
blood-stained employers will be hanged with him. 

Do not accuse me of forgetting the great doctrine 
of charity and forgiveness, inculcated by the Master 
whom I profess to serve. Neither outrage the 
government of God by demanding charity and for- 
giveness for murderers so base as these. There are 
some crimes, to condone which, under the plea of 
Christian charity, is to make ourselves criminals. And 
if this foul murder, the culmination of a hell-born 
treason is not of them, then the instincts of nature 
and the educational effects of our Christianity have 
grievously misled us. 



6 

Grant you, that the feeling of revenge should never 
possess a Christian heart. But the claims of justice 
should always have weight before the tribunal of a 
Christian mind. I ask for justice, in the name of my 
country ; I ask for justice, in the name of humanity; 
I ask for justice upon these murderers in the name 
of order, good government, faith in man, honor, and 
everything which distinguishes man from a brute, a 
devil from a man, and a Christian civilization from 
barbarism. And that justice would hang these infa- 
mous outlaws, employers and assassins, as high as the 
fifty cubits of Haman's gallows. 

To worldly vision, the nation's earthly Saviour has 
left us in an important hour. We are not gifted with 
the prescience of the Great Ruler. We must reason 
from human and imperfect vision and data. He had 
guided us so safely ; the nation's honor and safety 
had been so unreservedly placed in his hand by the 
nation's confidence and love, that a loyal people 
"trusted that it had been he who should have redeemed 
our Israel." Like the sorrowing disciples, who, 
journeying towards Emmaus from Jerusalem, after 
the tragedy of Calvary, talked of the crucified Saviour 
of the world, extolled his virtues and discussed his 
character while he was supposed to lie sleeping 
in the rocky sarcophagus in the garden of Joseph 
of Arimathea, so we, so the nation, will talk 
of the virtues, of the pure and noble character 
of him whom they trusted had been given of God 
for the utter redemption and restoration of the 
Republic. 



He was a man like us. He came to us stamped 
with the imperfections of humanity. He should not 
have been enthroned in the popular heart as its idol, 
but we fear that he was. Men die, the nation passes 
on if God, the great and good Governor, wills it. He 
was evidently born, educated, called, fitted and 
annointed for the hour and the position. The great 
Governor of nations makes no mistakes. If He gave 
us a Washington for the hour of our birth into national 
life ; for the bloody pangs of a seven years' parturition 
into governmental existence, so He gave us this 
second Washington ; this man-child of the turning 
point of our destiny. Death and life struggled at 
the very gates of our manhood. God gave us 
Abraham Lincoln, as the defender of our nation's life, 
our guide through the awful wilderness of civil war. 
He had prepared and educated him as a second 
Washington, — better than that, and of a more ancient 
type, a second Moses to the Lord's people. But 

" The tyrannous and bloody act is done ; 
The most arch deed of piteous massacre 
That ever yet this land was guilty of." 

Other tongues than mine must delineate his 
character, other pens will transcribe his deeds. He 
is interwoven into our nation's history, as no man 
living or dead can be, with the exception of George 
Washington. He was the first Saviour of his country; 
Abraham Lincoln was the second and his equal. When 
this awful scourge shall have passed away, and 
impartial history shall have perfected the record of 
the first and second revolutions, these two great 



8 

struggles for life or death to personal liberty, to the 
rights of man, to the equality of heavenly endow- 
ment, then the names of George Washington, of 
Virginia, and Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, will be 
written side by side. God made and called both of 
them. He fitted them for the task assigned to each. 
The first died peacefully in his bed, and his noble 
heart had already tasted the fruition of his earthly 
labors. His dying eye rested upon a country, a 
nation happy in its young life, and giving great hopes 
of its early and strong manhood. 

The second died by the hand of an assassin ere the 
work to which he had set himself was accomplished. 
True, the great points of his mission had been 
evolved from the clouds which have hovered around 
his administration. For four years he had guided 
the State, while bloody treason was striking its insane 
blows at the nation's life. The beginning of the end 
had come. He had been vigilant, untiring, zealous 
only for his country and the rights and liberties of his 
countrymen and their children and children's children 
to latest generations. He had stood in the front and 
by his presence and councils had stirred the bravery 
of our soldiers to heroic deeds. His telegrams to the 
people were full of words of cheer. He entered the 
rebel capital with our brave legions, to smile upon 
and receive the blessings of the loyal, both bond and 
free, before the bugles of retreat for Lee's army had 
hardly ceased their sounding. His great, kind, for- 
giving, generous, loving heart manifests itself in the 
conditions of the surrender of Lee's army, dictated 



by the heroic Grant, with whom the lamented patriot 
had been in council. 

He returned to his home in the national capital to 
enter upon the work of retrenchment in our expendi- 
tures, and to gather up the broken and fragmentary 
States, to bring them out from the chaos of rebellion and 
set them as stars in their proper orbit in the great 
American constellation. His first, his last, his only 
thought was for the welfare and glory of his country. 
In the first hours of his joy at the prospect of peace, 
having escaped the perils of death in the domain 
where treason held its court, he returned to die a 
martyr's death for the country which he had so 
faithfully served. 

In brief, this is the personal record of the country's 
second Saviour. He was born in Hardin county, 
Kentucky, February 12th, 1809, and removed with 
his father to Indiana in 1816. He spent two years 
at school in Stafford county, Virginia; taught school 
and studied law for a time in Culpepper county, of 
that State ; removed to Illinois in 1830, and turned 
his attention to agricultural pursuits. 

He served as a Captain of Volunteers in the cele- 
brated Black Hawk war, and was at one time a 
humble Postmaster in a village. He served four 
years in the legislature of the State of his adoption, 
during which time he again turned his attention to 
the study of law, finally settling at Springfield in 
that State to practice his profession. 

He was a member of the National Convention 
which nominated General Taylor for the Presidency 



10 

in 1848. He was a representative in Congress from 
Illinois from 1847 to 1849, serving upon important 
committees. He became better known to the Ameri- 
can public, acquiring distinction, by his series of 
debates with the honorable and lamented Stephen A. 
Douglas, when a seat in the United States Senate 
was contingent upon the result. 

He was nominated and elected to the Presidency 
of the Republic for the term commencing the 4th of 
March, 1861; and having faithfully served the country 
for four years, he was again most triumphantly 
re-elected for another term, carrying with him, not 
the ballots only, but the hearts of the people. He 
was inaugurated the second time on the 4th of 
March, 1865, and was assassinated at the instigation 
of the treason which he had so successfully frustrated 
in its purposes, on the 14th of April, 1865, his great 
life going out at twenty-two minutes past seven 
o'clock on the following morning. The treacherous 
and cowardly murderer was too sure in his aim. The 
blotting out of his intelligence was instantaneous. 
The noble brain, torn and mangled its entire length, 
refused to act, even to indicate the intelligence or 
the love which filled his noble soul. On the altar of 
his country he lies to-day, the last and noblest martyr 
to liberty. The gaping wound through which his 
life went out to its pilgrimage in the great future, is 
an attestation of his devotion to his country. Had 
he have been less firm, less honest, less noble, he 
would have been alive to-day. 



11 

He is dead. A nation buries him with sorrowful 
hearts and tearful eyes. From the bustling city, 
whose industry and commerce are hushed and silent 
to-day ; from the quiet town ; from the distant farm 
house home ; from the palace of wealth, and moving 
with heavy hearts across the threshold of honest 
poverty's door, the mourners come. A nation of 
reverent pall-bearers wait around his bier, and every 
man is a kinsman, a friend and a lover. The solemn 
bell ; the minute gun ; the low dirge of the martial 
band ; the solemn prayer of the minister ; the deep, 
sad chant of the choir ; the bowed, uncovered heads 
of twenty millions of people, all conspire to make 
his burial such as America seldom, if ever, grants to 
one of her sons. 

How shall I epitomize his character ? He was so 
perfectly transparent in his nature that the merest lad, 
in the most retired hamlet of our free North and West, 
could give you the details of honest Abraham Lincoln's 
character. He was a kind and indulgent husband 
and father ; a genial companion and noble friend ; a 
clear headed and comprehensive statesman ; an 
unbiased and firm judge ; firm also in what he con- 
scientiously believed to be right, and fearless of soul 
because he was utterly honest. He was a true 
believer in the divinity of the rights of man as man, 
the great democratic touchstone of the age, and the 
civil, as well as religious hope of the race. He was 
as a consequence, a profound hater of oppression, 
tyranny and tyrants. In that great and wonderful 
combination, — a massive heart containing a living 



12 

fountain of pure love and tenderest sympathy, a 
child's soul in its simplicity and purity, joined to a 
clear, discriminating, strong mind and inflexible will 
when following the right, God shows to the world 
how He creates and develops men, rocking them in 
the cradle, and moulding their manhood under the 
sunshine of American, democratic institutions. 

It was the hand of tyranny which put out the 
light of such a noble life ! In the words of another, 
I ask, in view of this murder : 

" Is there a crime 
Beneath the roof of Heaven, that stains the soul 
Of man with more infernal hue than damned 
Assassination ?" 

Who assassinated him ? Who called the whole 
nation to sit in the sack-cloth and ashes of woe, and 
to surround his martyr bier with tears of unfeigned 
sorrow ? — Slavery ! What serpent crept into our 
American Eden, to hiss its foul lie into credulous ears 
and proclaim that the nation should not die if it ate 
the forbidden fruit of despotism? The Serpent of 
Slavery ! Who partook of this fruit, and showed the 
nakedness of their professions of liberty and democ- 
racy to God and the whole universe ? A Southern 
aristocracy, founded upon the chattelization of 
humanity. Who quarrelled at their altar side, and 
because their brother's free gift was accepted, arose to 
the commission of murder, and drenched our Eden with 
the blood of tens of thousands of our young and 
noble American Abels ? Slavery, the second Cain in 
principle and practice. And, as God lives, who 



13 

fastened the brand of infamy and curse upon Cain's 
brow, and drove him from His presence, so shall 
Slavery, this sum of all human villanies, branded, 
despised, accursed by heaven and earth, a loathsome 
leper from the tomb of a dead barbarism, be exiled 
from the soil of our American Eden, and be driven 
back into the darkness of that barbarism, depravity 
and lust from whence it emanated. 

It has lived too long already. It has lived to 
thoroughly debauch nearly one-half of the States of 
the Union. It has lived to traffic in the bodies and 
souls of men as a drover speculates in his stock. It 
has lived to outrage and violate every command of 
Jehovah's decalogue, given for man's government, 
and to abrogate them in the name of law. It has 
lived to make virtue in woman a thing of public 
traffic ; to sunder all ties of consanguinity, to wring 
toil out of the muscles of youth and age, with 
bloody welts. It has lived to drive its coffled gangs 
of humanity to an early grave, and has made the 
Stars and Stripes, — the symbols of democratic 
liberty, — to cover their foul crimes, from the theft at 
birth to the finished murder at the grave's mouth. It 
has lived to control a government of nearly thirty 
millions of people ; dictate its policy ; shape its 
legislation ; mould its judiciary and laws ; control its 
Executive ; form its foreign policy ; demand its entire 
domain, and annihilate that bulwark of freedom, the 
freedom of speech and the press. 

It has inaugurated mob rule as law ; its instru- 
ments were canes, bowie knives, and derringer pistols. 



14 

It has sunk its advocates and defenders to the level 
of the low assassins and lazzaroni of Italy ; filled 
them with haughtiness and contempt of honest toil 
and the hard-handed laborer. Finally, upon the body 
of its hate it begat perjury, theft and treason. It has 
for four years rolled the garments of the nation in 
blood, bringing sorrow and woe to a million of house- 
hold altars, and uncounted millions of hearts. It has 
gnawed at the crust of poverty, rather than to 
acknowledge liberty and equality in man as of 
heavenly origin. It has beggared its friends, murdered 
its own children, and filled the long unmarked 
trenches with their dead forms. It has outraged all 
rules of civilized warfare — if war can be civilized. It 
has starved innocent prisoners to death, after abusing 
them so that they courted it as a welcome release 
from cruelty. 

They were our own fresh, young brothers and 
sons, citizens ! We saw them when, with firm tread 
and martial bearing, they turned their brave hearts 
and noble faces towards their country's foe. Falling 
into the hands of this insatiate demon, Slavery, its 
agents starved them into skeletons, jeered at their 
sufferings, penned and fed them like beasts, and 
with a maliciousness of cruelty which a savage can 
hardly imitate for want of an education suitable, 
murdered them slowly, that the noble lads might die 
a thousand deaths before their feet touched the cold 
waters whose full baptism they so much coveted as a 
release. Slavery, the mad fiend, baptized with that 



15 

name, the embodiment of all the foul refuse of sin, 
has done all this. 

It has gone one step farther, and because of it we 
are here to-day surrounded by these emblems of our 
woe. Beaten on the field ; dying by the blows which 
a stalwart democracy of the people was administering 
to it ; it now seeks the role of the assassin, stealthily 
creeps in the darkness and shadows, and when the 
defenceless victim is utterly unconscious, strikes its 
death blow and hies away. With the seductive lie 
upon its lips, it presses itself into the chamber of 
suffering, and under the plea of carrying relief, it 
leaps upon the bed and plies the dagger with the 
vindictiveness of a fiend and the rapidity of a 
maniac's hand. 

In the name of the lowest virtue which distin- 
guishes a man from a brute, I ask if it is not time 
that this fiend was dead ? Has it a single advocate 
here to-day ? 

Abraham Lincoln, the President, has made himself 
immortal by one single act which stands out pre- 
eminent in his Executive career. Not that all of his 
official acts have not been consistent and true. But 
this one links his name to an immortality of fame. 
Wherever, in coming ages, liberty is known and 
honored, the Emancipation Proclamation of President 
Lincoln will be cited in proof of his heroic devotion 
to the rights of man. If the murderer had given him 
the crown and seal of his martyrdom while the ink 
of the official signature upon that immortal instru- 
ment of liberty to down-trodden millions, was yet 



16 

undried, he could not have robbed the illustrious 
dead of the green laurel of fame which would have 
kept his memory fresh and fragrant among all coming 
generations. 

At a stroke of his pen, humanity, bound and 
crouching in its long, dusky lines, rose up, stood 
erect, freemen. The fetters breaking, fell from 
millions of limbs. Dusky faces smiled their first 
great joy as freemen. The accoucher of Slavery, 
who had so long stood at the portals of life to rob 
Jehovah of his homage and man of his rights, fell 
dead at his bloody work, and from henceforth God's 
I free children were born free. 

The slave pen yawned wide to let the sunlight of 
liberty in, and it dispersed the darkness of that foul 
pit forever. The auction block with its stalwart man; 
its tearful mother ; its dusky virgin and its prattling 
child ; — the auction block where virtue, stolen by 
theft, sold by avarice, and bought by lust, was placed 
in front of a gibbering fiend, with his eternal cry of 
" going," a man ; " going," a woman ; " gone," a 
soul ; fell at that pen stroke which wrote Abraham 
Lincoln, as falls a tyrant's head when the people will 
it. Then tyranny fell down foaming in its death, 
and freedom, liberty, democracy, arose to assert its 
rights over the last American born soul. The 
Declaration of Independence and the Proclamation 
of Emancipation are henceforth blended in our 
national history. 

But there are some useful lessons to be inclucated 
and derived from the mournful events of the hour. 



17 

We may notice one or two. We should learn 
the necessity of unity among ourselves. Brothers, 
we must come closer to each other. That cruel 
blow teaches us that no man is safe while the 
pistol and knife in the assassin's hand, and the 
flaming torch of the incendiary, are to be the weapons 
through which this child of Slavery, called Treason, 
hopes to maintain its existence. Let us unite 
hearts ; let us strike hands. Perish all party 
animosities, all party ties, in one fraternal brother- 
hood which looks to the eradication of Treason, and 
the spirit of despotism which has begotten it. We 
are Americans ! We are Unionists ! We are loyal 
to the Constitution and country ! Do not let us in 
this, our awful hour of distress, drift away from each 
other's sympathies upon any subordinate question of 
governmental policy. Let us vindicate our loyalty 
by the strongest and most heartfelt unity. 

But again. The exercise of justice is taught us in 
this event as we have never been taught it before. 
It is no time to talk of leniency and kindness to 
these inhuman fiends. The quality of mercy has 
been stretched to its utmost by the illustrious martyr 
whose mutilated body is now receiving its burial in 
the nation's capital. He was the best friend these 
rebels ever had, outside or inside their infernal lines, 
because his great heart was full of mercy and forgive- 
ness. Basely have they repaid that mercy ; foully 
have they requited that forbearance. Give us 
justice, simple and unadorned — except with a hempen 
halter — now ! Omnipotence can deal with such dark 



18 

spirits better in the prison house of the other life, 
than we can here. The peace of the world requires 
their exit. 

We do not countenance revenge ; far be it from 
us to possess it. May the good God keep our bosoms 
free from its presence. But we do, soberly, calmly, 
earnestly, for the good of our country, for the sake 
of humanity, for the rights and interests of men, 
demand justice. A halter for all these leading con- 
spirators, from Jeff Davis to his chief executioner, 
Lee, and downward to his hireling assassin, Booth. 
The mourners in all their cases would be few. 

We demand in the name of an outraged people, in 
the name of justice, that public sentiment shall call for 
the trial for Treason of these leading conspirators, as fast 
as the fortunes of war shall place them in our hands, 
and that upon their conviction they shall suffer the 
death they deserve. We demand for the assassins 
and incendiaries a speedy trial for murder, and as 
speedy an execution as is consistent with allowing 
them to seek a pardon for their guilty souls at the 
hands of Him whose laws they have so foully 
trampled under their feet. 

The nation would unite in a free pardon to the 
blinded, the conscripted, the men who have been 
led, or forced, into striking a blow against the life of 
the nation ; but for their leaders — ignominious 
death. 

God's justice stands out clear and distinct in the 
retributions of Providence, as they mark the ages of 
the past. It would be a fruitful theme could we 



19 

spend an hour in its examination. The lamented 
President Lincoln is not the first illustrious example 
of martyrdom in high places. I remember that the 
great Caesar was assassinated in the very Senate 
chamber of republican Rome. Brutus caused his 
death by the knives of assassins, himself the foulest 
murderer of them all. For that act, the Roman 
people through their representatives, ordered the 
Senate house in which Caesar was slain to be kept 
shut ; and a decree was made that the " Ides of 
March " should be called " the Parricide," and the 
Senate should never more assemble on that day. 
Thus stood public opinion in the Roman Empire at 
that age. Should we be less just than they ? 

Now for the retributive judgments of God con- 
nected with the act and actors as developed in history. 
Scarcely any of those who were accessory to his 
(Caesar's) murder, survived him more than three 
years or died a natural death. They were all con- 
demned by the Senate. Some were taken off by 
one accident, some by another. Part of them per- 
ished at sea, others fell in battle ; and some slew 
themselves with the same poinard with which they 
had stabbed Csesar. Brutus himself was taken 
prisoner through the defection and treachery of his 
own troops, by Antony ; being betrayed in his 
attempted flight by a Gaulish Chief upon whom he 
had formerly conferred favors, and was put to death 
one year subsequent to Caesar's assassination. 

In our own country, and fresh within our memories, 
Slavery, in the person of Preston S. Brooks, of South 



20 

Carolina, came near bringing an illustrious Senator 
from New England, Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, 
to his death. You know the speedy and terrible end 
to which he came by the apparent act of God. 

But why multiply cases? We are not infidels. 
God deals in justice with criminals, and in mercy 
with penitents. Let the nation put away its sympathy 
for such criminals as now blot our history with their 
dark deeds. The mangled body of our dead President 
calls for the exercise of this attribute of our nation. 

But again. Reliance upon God and His merciful 
overrulings, is taught us in this sad event. Have 
we drifted away from our old moorings of trust in 
God? Have we become skeptics upon the subject 
of empire belonging to the Infinite and Eternal 
Ruler ? In the birth of our nation, a Christian 
statesman arose in his place in its first councils, and 
proposing an invocation to the Universal Ruler, said : 
" If, as we are taught in the Bible, a sparrow fall 
not without His notice, how can an empire rise with- 
out His aid ?" His hand of overruling will be in this 
event for good, if a Christain people seek His presence. 
Our hero martyr may have finished all his effective 
work for the nation's safety. We know not. Whether 
it requires a longer expiation for our sins, or whether 
we are by a still firmer policy, directed by a more 
inflexible and iron hand, to be led to the inauguration 
of peace founded upon justice, Omniscience alone 
knows. We are only safe when we humble our- 
selves before Him, trust His care and obey His 
commands. 



21 

Moses, the deliverer of his countrymen, did not 
enter the land of his rest to possess it with his 
brothers, after all the perils of the wilderness. 
Abraham Lincoln, leading our people through the 
four years' wilderness of war, at the very banks of 
the Jordan beyond which was peace, like Moses, died 
without the possession of that which his heart so 
greatly coveted for his countrymen. 

Four years' of fratricidal war ! Begun at Sumter, 
in the harbor of Charleston ! On the anniversary 
of that memorable 14th of April, when our gallant 
Anderson lowered the flag of our country at the 
bidding of traitors, amid the broken walls and burn- 
ing barracks, the red hot shells, the suffocating smoke, 
and the sufferings of his heroic, patriot band, — on 
that anniversary, just after the same brave Anderson 
had stood upon the crumbling ramparts and reverently 
looking up to God, had thrown again the same sacred 
emblem to the breeze ; when the iron throats of our 
cannon on every fort and deck had given it the royal 
salute of honor and mastery of all the territory 
which had witnessed its humiliation ; when the 
eloquent orator of Brooklyn had pronounced an 
address worthy of so important and auspicious an 
event, then, at the nightfall of that anniversary 
day, the assassin prepared his instruments, and 
death held held high carnival in the nation's 
capital. 

" O ! what a fall was there, my countrymen ; 
Then I and you and all of us fell down, 
Whilst bloody Treason flourished over us." 



22 

Mark you, brothers ! Officials, citizens, soldiers of 
our gallant State, which has its dead heroes on 
every battle-field which has been ploughed and 
trenched by this war, behold to-day the deep damna- 
tion of this Treason ! Statesmen, judges, legislators, 
citizens, soldiers of Rhode Island, come to the last 
vision of your loved President, and then reverently 
bury him. 

" Look you here, 
Here is himself, marred, as you see, with traitors." 

That noble form is mutilated, that shining light is 
quenched. He sleeps with the soldiers he loved ; he 
perishes a martyr to liberty and the rights of man. 

Weave the cypress wreath, crown the nation, for 
all should be mourners ! Lay upon his heart the 
sprig of acassia, the emblem which most fittingly 
speaks his immortality. Gather to the burial of 
your best and truest friend, and come in the vast 
procession of States! Living we loved him, in 
death, honor and reverence mingle with our love. 
Bear away the mortal with reverent hands. 

Soft be your repose, sweet your sleep, patriot, 
hero and friend ! The seal of your martyrdom was 
your crown of earthly glory ! Millions of pilgrims 
will weep over your grave. A long dusky line of 
emancipated brothers and sisters will pause to kiss 
the sod which covers your form from their tearful 
gaze. 

" Servant of God ! Well done ! 

Thy glorious warfare's past, 
The battle's fought ; the victory won, 
And thou art crowned at last." 



23 

Abraham Lincoln, the honest, the noble, the man- 
child, — nay, the pure child-man of the age; the 
statesman ; the kind judge ; the second Washington ; 
illustrious martyr to the liberty of man, farewell ! 
" Hail and farewell !" A nation utters it. 







S '12 



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